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FROM THE DIARY OF A SNAIL

Name: FROM THE DIARY OF A SNAIL
Author: Günter Grass
ISBN: 0749394552

by Günter Grass ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1973

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From the Diary of a Snail is a documentary phantasmagoria about Gunter Grass' travels through West Germany in 1969 when he was campaigning for Willy Brandt and the Social Democratic party. In it he turns away from his customary and devastating role as a comedian of the grotesque to become Old Sobersides, asking his readers to pause before the precipice of history, beseeching us, like Cromwell, out of the bowels of his disquietude to think that we may perhaps be wrong, warning us that a heady hedonism is not progress, that bureaucratic witch doctors and scientific planners are not infallible, that moderation as a tactic of politics is not a sin, that conservatism as a philosophy of the soul or a philosophy of society does not necessarily engender cultural stagnation, that socialism without democracy is a sham, that the prophets of egalitarianism who do not nurture the individual or respect human eccentricity are the harbingers of a dire and implacable order, that conveyer-belt capitalism and puritanical communism are to be resisted. The book is full of notational chitchat (Grass among his family, Grass in the back rooms of the Federal Republic), fragments of ideology (the strategies of Brandt's Ostpolitik, for instance, as well as provincial squabbles and squibs virtually incomprehensible to an American), a recurring allegory concerning a pedagogical alter ego called Doubt (he collects snails which represent Grass' zoological emblem for "the affinity between stasis and progress"), concluding finally with a brilliant divagation on the theme of Melancholy and Utopia. A rambling, oddly appealing work, whose cautionary last words would surely be clear to the heart of Camus: "Only those who know and respect stasis in progress, who have once and more than once given up, who have sat on an empty snail shell and experienced the dark side of utopia, can evaluate progress.

Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1973

ISBN: 0749394552

Page Count: 310

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1973

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
OF ALL THAT ENDS
by Günter Grass ; translated by Breon Mitchell ; illustrated by the author

- BOOK REVIEW
FROM GERMANY TO GERMANY
translated by Günter Grass ; by Krishna Winston

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BOX
by Günter Grass

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ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

by George Orwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1946

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A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.

Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946

ISBN: 0452277507

Page Count: 114

Publisher: Harcourt, Brace

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
GEORGE ORWELL
by George Orwell ; edited by Peter Davison

- BOOK REVIEW
DIARIES
by George Orwell & edited by Peter Davison

- BOOK REVIEW
ALL ART IS PROPAGANDA
by George Orwell

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.